Posts tagged Shelley Workinger

Shelley Workinger delivers another great novel with Sound, the finale (?) of the Solid series.

The story starts with Clio dealing with the fall-out of the events from Settling, and then jumps into the new event to deal with.

The pace of the novel is fast—something we’ve come to expect and enjoy with these books. Turn to the first page and buckle up for the ride. If you’ve read the previous two stories, you’ll feel like you’ve been dropped right back in the camp and haven’t missed a beat.

I won’t spoil any part of the plot, but will say that the climax sneaks up on you. You’re waiting for it and then BAM! And through dealing with the crisis du jour, Clio and her friends resolve their issues, tie up the past and look to the future.

If I have only one criticism, it’s that I think we could have learned a lot more about Clio and her circle of friends. Of course, that would require 2-3 more books.

Although this is the conclusion to the Solid trilogy, I hope that Shelley will consider starting a new trilogy to take readers on a continuing ride through the next stage of Clio and her friends’ lives.

I jumped at the opportunity to post! It’s a perfect forum to tell readers how food played an important role in the personal discovery of the clones in Sue’s Fingerprint. When writing my story of the clones’ arrival on Earth with no memories or knowledge or clothes, I thought about what challenges they would have learning about, and adapting to life. What wouldn’t they know? They wouldn’t know complex things that teens or adults would know, but they also wouldn’t know what any child would know; how to read, how to write, what to wear, and what foods they like and don’t like. So I wrote a lot about the clones’ discovery of these things, including food and cooking. I gave the reader a view to their discovery of pizza, PB&J, popcorn, butter, pancakes and coffee. Readers of Sue’s Fingerprint will also see the start of Sue’s career as a chef and Martha’s career as a barista

Please go to the blog to read my post for the details. I hope you enjoy my take on food in fiction. 😀

Okay… so maybe I’m slowly becoming a book blogger after all. Since I enjoyed the first book in Shelley Workinger’s Solid series (i.e. Solid), I had to review the second book; Settling.

Settling was a slower read than the first in the series, which was really good and which I totally enjoyed. It gave me more time to get to know the characters, especially Clio. Shelley shows us what’s going on inside Clio’s head and how she thinks. It gives perspective as to how she acts and interacts with her circle of friends. And, although romance is not my genre of choice, I did enjoy the amount that was included in Settling. The slower first half of the book perfectly set up the exciting last half of the book.

As with Solid, once the action kicked in, I couldn’t put the book down. The events (I’m not going spoil it) unfolded naturally… Clio was not simply plopped conveniently into situations to save the day. The flow of the story line was believable and the happenings were realistic.

Which brings us to the ending… No, Clio did not ride off into the sunset, smiling and waving to all. And if she had, it would have been a terrible ending. I can’t say much without giving it away, but I will say that I REALLY liked how it ended.

And dang it! Now I gotta read the next in the series, Sound, because you can’t just leave the series hanging where it did in Settling. It’s not fair! I’ll be waiting for Sound to be published and I’ll be one of the first in line to buy it.

On my geeky rating scale of 0-100 degrees Celsius, 100 degrees being boiling (red-hot awesome), Settling started out cool, but heated up at the end. As I read, I wasn’t sure it would make it close to boiling, but it did.

When I read the synopsis of Solid, I could not help but notice the similarity between Shelley Workinger’s book and mine, Sue’s Fingerprint; genetically modified children brought to a military base for observation v. new people cloned from alien goo contained on an abandoned military base.

Synopsis of Solid from Amazon.com:

Eighteen years ago, a rogue Army doctor secretly experimented with a chromosomal drug on unknowing pregnant women. When he was killed not long after the children were born, any knowledge and evidence seemed to die with him – except for the living, breathing, human products of his work.
Almost two decades later, the newly self-proclaimed “open-book” military unearths the truth about the experiment, bringing Clio Kaid and the other affected teens to a state-of-the-art, isolated campus where they soon discover that C9x did indeed alter their chromosomes, its mutations presenting as super-human abilities. The military kids, who come from across the nation and all walks of life, come into
their own as lighter-than-air ‘athletes’; ‘indies’ as solid as stone walls; teens who can make themselves invisible and others who can blind with their brilliance.
While exploring her own special ability, forging new friendships and embarking on first love, Clio also stumbles onto information indicating that the military may not have been entirely forthcoming with them
and that all may not be as it seems…

Solid is a fast-paced read that captured and held my attention from the start. The novel opens with Clio arriving at the base and moves quickly. While she and her new friends discover about themselves, they discover the purpose of the camp and stumble upon a secret plot.

The story never breaks stride as it moves from the camp’s activities through Clio’s romance to the exciting conclusion. Details of Clio’s and the others’ history are revealed during the action without uncomfortably pausing for monologues of memories or flash-backs. The plot remains in the present, which I enjoyed.

I found the emotions of Clio to be believable, if not a little naive. I also found the dialogue between the new friends to be realistic, but I thought the interations and reactions of the characters to be a little simple compared to what I expect of Juniors in high school. Admittedly, I am a bit older (refer to my bio) and may have a more “seasoned” perspective than typical readers of this book.

I felt like the story could have benefitted from more details and suspense, but this might be because the story held my attention so well that I wanted more.